Future of education

The d.school at Stanford is a wonderful place for both dreamers and doers. They have been looking at  ways in which education will evolve, and have come up with a few versions of the future of a university at http://www.stanford2025.com . One of the options that they have created is to imagine your own version of education in the future. 

I spent one afternoon with my brother-in-law, Abhishek Singhal,  trying to design our version of this future. Abhishek spoke about "Always learning, Never learning" as a concept. I agree, given so much information availability around us, you do not need to have prolonged formal education as we had to, as you will always be able to learn the specifics needed to do a particular thing well through online forums. You have the ability to acquire any skill-set on an "as needed" basis.

But there is a merit to a formalized education. And I postulated that formal education should be divided up into a few core skills to be acquired in different buckets before one turns 21. These 5 buckets that we could come up with include:

1.5 years - Basic Mindset Development - basics of all subjects along with developing critical thinking ability - anything that builds up the basics allowing you to comprehend how various things work, and build a "growth" mindset

0.5 years - Grooming - critical to improve your social skills and ability to communicate with a larger audience as it is easy to reach out to a large audience

1.5 years - Physical Education - a fit mind needs to be housed in a strong body - dedicated effort to strengthen the various parts of the body and learn basic skills of teamwork and leadership requires active engagement in a sport

1.5 years - Mission Education - understand ways in which you can make the world a better place for people around you - developing empathy for others, and actively engaging in "servant leadership" style projects

1 year - Business Education - update yourself to understand the latest developments in the business world through an academic lens - academia tends to have the luxury of looking at an idealistic scenario, and their perspective is always a good way to look at your own self from an outside in perspective. You can also say that with 2 management degrees, I am biased towards the value of this type of education.

And this can be done interchangeably with breaks in-between to assimilate more real world experience.

Would love to hear your thoughts!